RE: Good Old (Tech) Days....WAS "Can this career be saved?"

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chantel Brathwaite
[...], but the work load
> was light and advancement was extremely limited.  So, I ended up
> spending most of my time teaching myself the Wang wordprocessor (anyone
> else remember that?), 

In 1981 I started work with Micom, a direct competitor to Wang.

Shortly after, Micom was acquired by NV Philips. They 
kept making dedicated word processing machines for a while 
longer, while a lovely big manufacturing facility was built 
by the Trans Canada Highway in Montreal, and then began 
switching over to building IBM PC clones. 

I remember the Micom WP machines having refrigerator-size 
hard disk and CPU units, with multiple satellite 
workstations. I got to debug the various boards inside, 
and the overall systems. The early PCs started to have 
hard disks when producers began making 5 megabyte units 
small enough to fit in a desktop chassis. I also recall 
the overlap where I'd stuff a 5MB 8-inch HD brick into 
a PC and the same day I'd replace a dinner-plate sized 
5MB HD in one of the last dedicated Word Processors.

Does modern MS Word make even a one-word file small 
enough to fit in 5MB? 

When the first few commercially-usable word processing 
programs became available for PC, the dedicated Micoms 
and Wangs were quickly phased out. 

Philips, however, didn't lose sight of the dedicated 
WP market. Too bad their project development times 
were so long in those days. By the time I'd gone from 
a factory-tech job, through a staff third-line support 
position, to my first formal TW job (still in Philips), 
it was the mid-eighties and half of the TW department 
in Montreal was working on the docs for the future 
Philips documentation system. A highlight was a portrait 
oriented 11- or 14-inch monochrome, high-res monitor 
that they called "Paper-white".  The system had myriad 
features to make the creation and output of documents 
easy and professional. It was intended for use by 
secretaries and by professional documentation departments, 
as well as by research labs and so on. 

It was canned in 1989. Never saw the light of day.
Shame.

Meanwhile, Philips - which enjoyed deity status in 
Europe in those days, had no clue how to market in 
North America, so most of our production of PC clones 
went back across the pond and almost none of the 
hoped-for American sales ever happened. So they closed 
the place in 1990. Norelco, Sylvania, Magnasonic and 
about 18 other household-name brands were actually 
Philips, but they never made the connection that 
would have capitalized on all that brand recognition 
for the parent company. 

They were a lovely incubator for budding TW's, while 
they lasted. 

 - kevin 
<bumpf-start>
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